svn2git - command failed - error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git

Question

We are trying to migrate from svn to git using svn2git utility (https://github.com/nirvdrum/svn2git). The utility seems to fail every time with below error. If anyone has seen the same error or have any better alternatives, please share.

command
svn2git https://xyz.xyz.com/svn/svnrepo/ --verbose --authors authors.txt

console output

Running command: git svn init --prefix=svn/ --no-metadata --trunk='trunk' --tags
='tags' --branches='branches' https://xyz.xyz.com/svn/svnrepo/  
Running command: git config --local --get user.name  
Running command: git config --local svn.authorsfile authors.txt  
Running command: git svn fetch  
Running command: git branch -l --no-color  
Running command: git branch -r --no-color  
Running command: git config --local --get user.name  
Running command: git config --local --get user.email  
Running command: git checkout -f master  
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.  
command failed:  
git checkout -f master  

P.S. My SVN repo URL is correct too, it's just above the trunk. I am trying this on Win7 64-bit machine.

Answer 1

There are pleny tools called svn2git, the probably best one is the KDE one from https://github.com/svn-all-fast-export/svn2git. I strongly recommend using that svn2git tool. It is the best I know available out there and it is very flexible in what you can do with its rules files.

The svn2git tool you used is based on git-svn and git-svn is not the right tool for one-time conversions of repositories or repository parts. It is a great tool if you want to use Git as frontend for an existing SVN server, but for one-time conversions you should not use git-svn, but svn2git which is much more suited for this use-case.

If you are not 100% about the history of your repository, svneverever from http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=763 is a great tool to investigate the history of an SVN repository when migrating it to Git.

---

Even though git-svn (or the wrong svn2git in your case) is easier to start with, here are some further reasons why using the KDE svn2git instead of git-svn is superior, besides its flexibility:

• the history is rebuilt much better and cleaner by svn2git (if the correct one is used), this is especially the case for more complex histories with branches and merges and so on
• the tags are real tags and not branches in Git
• with git-svn the tags contain an extra empty commit which also makes them not part of the branches, so a normal fetch will not get them until you give --tags to the command as by default only tags pointing to fetched branches are fetched also. With the proper svn2git tags are where they belong
• if you changed layout in SVN you can easily configure this with svn2git, with git-svn you will loose history eventually
• with svn2git you can also split one SVN repository into multiple Git repositories easily
• or combine multiple SVN repositories in the same SVN root into one Git repository easily
• the conversion is a gazillion times faster with the correct svn2git than with git-svn

There are many reasons why git-svn is worse and the KDE svn2git is superior. :-)

Answer 2

Not much of an "answer", but here is the solution for my case. BTW, that error message from svn2git was really far from helpful.

My reason for getting exactly the same error was that I didn't use the full path of the trunk when doing the initial import.

The SVN repo had structure like this:

https://example.com/folderA/projectName
 - trunk
 - tags
 - ...

and I ran the svn2git with only svn2git https://example.com/folderA --username ....

When I included also the "/projectName" to the repo path, and did this:

svn2git https://example.com/folderA/projectName --username ...

...all worked great. Also, before retrying - I removed the existing .git folder, from previous attempts.

Answer 3

Late, but someone might still need this. I managed to track this down to the issue #241. Long story short, Windows doesn't understand single quotes (') around arguments which the script adds to git command. There are probably various ways to fix it, but I just manually hacked the migration.rb file, namely the following snippet:

    cmd += "--trunk=#{trunk} " unless trunk.nil?
    unless tags.nil?
      # Fill default tags here so that they can be filtered later
      tags = ['tags'] if tags.empty?
      # Process default or user-supplied tags
      tags.each do |tag|
        cmd += "--tags=#{tag} "
      end
    end
    unless branches.nil?
      # Fill default branches here so that they can be filtered later
      branches = ['branches'] if branches.empty?
      # Process default or user-supplied branches
      branches.each do |branch|
        cmd += "--branches=#{branch} "
      end

Note there are no quotes around #{trunk}, #{tag} and #{branch} any more. That did the trick.